Stargazers are about to get their annual celestial treat: A bright meteor shower, the Geminids, will grace skies worldwide this week, with a peak in activity on Dec. 13. No telescope or binoculars are required to see the show — just use your bare eye...

As NASA's Mars rover Curiosity prepares to use its rock-boring drill for the first time, engineers are troubleshooting an issue with the power tool that may affect the entire mission. Curiosity's fast-spinning percussive drill should make it through ...

The secretive U.S. Air Force X-37B robotic space plane has been cleared to lift off on Dec. 11. The X-37B vehicle and its cargo bay packed with a classified payload is set to make the third mission of the program. Also called Orbital Test Vehicle-3, ...

North Korea may be preparing to attempt another rocket launch in the next few weeks, new satellite imagery suggests. The photo, which was taken Monday (Nov. 26), shows increased activity at North Korea's Sohae Satellite Launch Station. The hustle and...

Hairspray might one day serve as the sign that aliens have reshaped distant worlds, researchers say. Such research to find signs of alien technology is now open to funding from the public. Science fiction has long imagined that humans could transform...

Early Tuesday morning (Nov. 27), you'll be able to watch two planets that will pass each other in the dawn. The planets in question are Venus and Saturn. One planet will be slowly descending into eventual obscurity, while the other will become increa...

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. In Musk's vision, the ambitious Ma...

A NASA spacecraft is keeping tabs on a vast dust storm on Mars that has spawned changes in the Martian atmosphere felt by two rovers on the planet's surface. The Martian dust storm was first spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Nov....

Turkey and all the trimmings are a staple for Americans on Thanksgiving, and that doesn't have to change for Americans in space. Astronaut food has come a long way from the early days of human spaceflight, and crewmembers on the International Space S...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made an important discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to find out what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest. The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample An...

Did you hear about the new restaurant on the moon? Great food, but no atmosphere. While that wisecrack has been floating about in space circles for decades, a NASA lunar orbiter will gather detailed information about the moon's atmosphere next year, ...

The sun unleashed a monster eruption of super-hot plasma on Nov. 16 in back-to-back solar storms captured on camera by a NASA spacecraft. The giant sun eruption, called a solar prominence, occurred at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT), with another event flaring...

In a rare direct photo of a world beyond Earth, astronomers have spotted a planet 13 times more massive than Jupiter, the largest planet in our own solar system. The planet orbits a star called Kappa Andromedae that is 2.5 times the mass of the sun a...

A young spaceflight company is building what it hopes will be the ultimate space handyman, a combination repair droid and orbital gas station to serve ailing satellites around Earth. The company, called ViviSat, is planning to launch a fleet of speci...

A new celestial wonder has stolen the title of most distant object ever seen in the universe, astronomers report. The new record holder is the galaxy MACS0647-JD, which is about 13.3 billion light-years away. The universe itself is only 13.7 billion ...

The annual Leonid meteor shower reaches its peak this week and may get a boost from a moonless weekend sky. The actual peak of the 2012 Leonid meteor shower is on Saturday (Nov. 17) at 3 a.m. EST, but, like all meteor showers, the celestial fireworks...

The U.S. military is launching a far-out neighborhood watch. But instead of warding off burglars, these amateur watchdogs are tracking orbital debris and possible satellite collisions in Earth orbit. The sky-monitoring project, called SpaceView, is a...

A European satellite has captured video of the moon blocking the sun, as seen from space, during a total solar eclipse that wowed huge crowds of spectators who watched the event from Australia yesterday. The solar eclipse video from space was recorde...

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